On The Ganga Mail

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Today is Vijaya Dashami. Usually
on this day, for the past few years, I’ve been taking the flight back to
Chennai after spending Durga Puja in Calcutta.
This year, however, I did not take the flight to Chennai. That’s because I no
longer live in Chennai. I now live in Calcutta,
having moved here on August 6, after having spent close to 18 years in what I
call TamarindCity.

Why did I move to Calcutta? I will tell the
story some other time. Or may be there is no story at all. Ever since I began
work on Longing, Belonging, in 2011, I found myself belonging as much to Calcutta as I did to Chennai; and this shift
is a mere technicality. It’s like being on roaming: I remain rooted to Chennai
even as I connect with my cultural roots in Bengal.

This morning I woke up very late,
exhausted by successive nights of pandal-hopping. Before lunch I read a few
pages of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines;
it was a struggle to keep the eyes glued to the pages — so used to they are now
to the phone screen. There was also distraction is the form of dhaak beats,
being relayed from the neighbourhood pandal over loudspeakers mounted on bamboo
poles.

A part of me wanted to be at the
pandal: to say parting prayers to the goddess, to take pictures of women
applying vermilion on the goddess and on one another’s cheeks. Then an
announcement was made on the loudspeaker: women who still hadn’t done the
vermilion thing could do so only until three o’clock, after which the goddess
and her children would head for the river.

After lunch I hurried to the
pandal, just in time to catch the last woman, perched on a ladder, applying
vermilion on the fish-eyed goddess. She had barely finished when the men took
over: first removing the weapons, then removing the idols, loading them onto waiting
trucks. I got into the car and asked the driver to take me to the riverside — I
had no particular destination in mind; any place from where I could watch the
immersion — it could be even a boat — would do. I was, however, pretty much
sure that the car would not be allowed anywhere near the river today.

Near the Maidan I found myself tailing
a Durga-laden truck. “Follow this truck,” I told the driver. We curved around
the Maidan, past the EdenGardens, past more
Durga-laden trucks, before arriving at the ghat where dozens of such trucks
were already parked. The air pulsated with the beats of dhaak — near as well as distant. I switched on my phone camera and jumped
out of the car.

The sight, alas, was too
spectacular to be captured accurately with phone or even words. The sun — a soft
orange ball — was swiftly lowering itself on the horizon marked by the VidyasagarBridge. And against its fading light sprouted
numerous silhouettes, of the ten-armed Durga — all beautiful, sometimes
breathtaking, works of art that were being gaped at at their respective pandals
until late last night. And now they were about to be consigned to the river; the
clay would return to where it belonged — the riverbed.

The immersion was in progress.
People carried the idols down the steps and pushed them, as gently as possible,
into the water, and filled clay pots with the water — shanti jal — to carry them back to the empty pandal in the neighbourhood
where people would be waiting to have the water sprinkled on them. One moment
Durga was there, the next moment she’s gone — another 360 days before she
returns again.

Why does Durga have to go — months
of labour and excitement washed away in a matter of minutes?

There are people better qualified to answer that. I have my own answers, though. Imagine Durga idols being made of, say, marble, and installed permanently in neighbourhoods — there would be worship but no fun! Not to mention the loss of annual assured income for hundreds of thousands of people — artisans, decorators, labourers, electricians, caterers, it's one long list. And if Durga did not go, how would the Bengali look forward to her arrival, year after year. Looking-forward is vital to human existence.

I have another way of looking at it. Perseverance — yes, Durga's departure teaches you perseverance. When that beautiful face, admired by millions for five days, goes below the surface of the water, a knife pokes your heart: over those five days the clay face would have acquired a life. And then you start from scratch all over again — again and again.

I walked downstream to Millennium Ghat, descended its steps, put my hand in the water and sprinkled a few drops on my head. The water was not only blessed by Durga — it contained many Durgas.

And sitting by my bed right now is a small carton that contains the 10 complimentary copies sent to me by my publishers. That makes this my 'fastest book' so far: everything — the travelling, the writing, the editing, the revisions, the printing — was done in under two years, even though I travelled far and wide for it, from Punjab in one extreme to Tripura and Assam and Meghalaya in the other.

As the title suggests, the book records my travels to places that sit on the two lines that Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew on the map of the subcontinent while partitioning India. Yes, he drew not one but two lines — one split Punjab and the other, a much longer line, carved out a province called East Bengal — even though when people talk about Partition, particularly these days, they confine themselves to the line Radcliffe drew across Punjab.

What makes Gazing at Neighboursparticularly special for me is the trips I made along the boundary of the erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh): they took me to places I had never been to before and probably would have never visited in my lifetime: what a loss — oh, what a loss! — that would have been.

And the most unforgettable moment from Punjab? Well, it wasn't exactly on the border but in Amritsar, at the Golden Temple, at four-thirty in the morning:

"Wearing a
headscarf and my underwear, I stepped into the tank — the pool of nectar. The
water was pleasantly warm and after bathing in it I felt my sensory system sufficiently
refreshed to appreciate the magical hour of dawn. I suddenly saw better, heard
better, felt better. I reflected upon life as I lingered in the water,
listening to gurbani, the words of the gurus, being sung in the sanctum
sanctorum. That’s when I realised why I felt so good."

The writing of the book was not just about visiting places I might have never set foot in otherwise, but also learning historical facts I had remained foolishly unaware of all my life. For example, independent India was born on the midnight of 14/15 August 1947 without knowing where exactly its boundaries with Pakistan lay: the maps were made public by Lord Mountbatten only on August 17. It's a fact, but I didn't know it — and many still don't.

The travels taught me something as well: that if you actually travel along the border, you will never really hate Pakistan or harbour ill feelings towards Bangladesh. You will find how everything is just the same: from the colour of the crops to the colour of the people. Which is why you will never hear anti-Pakistan cries on the border: you hear them either in the air-conditioned, insulated TV studios of Delhi or on the streets of Mumbai, which is a good 1,000 km away from Attari.

As Mark Twain noted more than a century ago: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." His words hold truer today.

So pack your bags. The next best thing would be to get hold of a copy of Gazing at Neighbours. It is equally fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, trust me.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Behind me you can see the Samjhauta Express pulling into Attari station.

Right behind me is the Bangladeshi village of Tamabil, in Sylhet. I stand facing Dawki, a village in the state of Meghalaya.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

I am mildly emotional about October 17 — I never seem to forget the date — because it was on this day in 2005 that I started this blog. That makes Ganga Mail 11 years old.

The blog was created in a setting similar to what I find myself in right now: a dark room, gently lit up by a lamp with yellow bulb; me reclining on the mattress with the laptop; music playing softly on the speakers connected to the laptop; a glass of whisky and ashtray at hand; an empty stomach. What more does one need to write?

I chose 'bytheganges' as the URL because I wanted something unique, something I thought defined me. The truth is that back then, the Ganges or the Ganga hardly meant a thing to me other than that I had grown up near its banks in Kanpur. Little did I know that by naming my blog after the river I had only provoked Destiny into ensuring that my path got intertwined with that of the river's. I even have the evidence.

I was 35 when I started this blog, and until then, in spite of having grown up by the river, I would have visited the Ganga — I am ashamed to say this — maybe seven times in all, and they include childhood visits. But ever since Ganga Mail was created, our paths have been crossing far too often — and they are bound to keep crossing in the near future as well with even greater frequency and intensity.

But it would be unfair to hold Destiny alone responsible. The birth of Ganga Mail also marked the beginning of my journey as a writer, and, whenever, as a writer, I followed the smell of the soil in search of my soul, I invariably found myself sitting by the Ganga.

Chai, Chai, published in 2009, is my most popular book till date: it is an account of my visits to towns that are famous as railway junctions but about which very little is known otherwise. Many people, for example, know Jolarpet or Guntakal as railway stations, but how many of them are familiar with the towns of Jolarpet and Guntakal? That was the idea behind writing Chai, Chai.

One of the towns I included in the book was Mughal Sarai. I had had childhood memories of Mughal Sarai station. The train from Kanpur to Howrah would make a long halt there: the engine and the staff would change and lunch would be served to passengers in compartmented plates. During my stay in Mughal Sarai during the writing of Chai, Chai, I decided to visit Benares, which was only 10 km away. And even though Benares did not belong to the book, I decided to include it anyway: the emotions I experienced in the ancient city was too precious not to be documented.

Shortly after Chai, Chai came out, a colleague told me, "My son is only 10 years old, he has read your book and he loves you."

I felt extremely flattered, but at the same time wondered why a 10-year-old, growing up in the era of budget airlines, should like a book about railway junctions.

A few months later the colleague threw a party at his home. I was invited too. As soon as I reached his place he took me to his son's bedroom and told him, "Here, meet your favourite writer. Won't you say hello to him?"

The child blushed and covered his face with a pillow. I removed the pillow and asked him, "Have you really read Chai, Chai?"

He nodded.

"Then tell me what did you like the most about the book."

"The part about Benares," he said and quickly covered his face with the pillow again.

That's when I understood that the charm of the Ganga transcended age, gender and location. And also felt mildly proud that I owned — no, not the Ganga — but Ganga Mail.

Saturday, October 08, 2016

Feeling a little emotional about Calcutta tonight, I sat down
to put down my thoughts in writing but I am unable to because the radio is on —
106.2 FM, which describes itself as ‘Kolkatar gaan, Kolkatar pran’ (the songs
of Calcutta, the soul of Calcutta).

I can, of course, switch off the radio, but that’s easier
said that done when my kind of songs are plating back to back — Bengali as well
as Hindi numbers of Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman. It is one thing to possess a
collection of these songs and play them as and when you want to, quite another
when the radio plays them. When the RJ plays these songs, he validates the fact
that your choice is far from outdated. In Calcutta,
someone born in the 1970s can never feel old.

And just when you think that you know all the songs created
during that golden decade, the radio springs a surprise. Only minutes ago, the
channel played a Bengali song that instantly grabbed my attention: sung by Asha
Bhosle and Kishore Kumar and pictured — as I discovered on You Tube — on Amol
Palekar and Sharmila Tagore in a 1979 film called Mother.

The song has made me even more emotional.

I am not alone. This is that time of the year when every
Bengali living in Calcutta
gets emotional. It’s Durga Puja, after all. But why should they get emotional during
Durga Puja, the ultimate season of joy and festivity?

That’s because they spend the entire year waiting for Durga
Puja, but once the goddess and her four children have taken their positions in
the neighbourhood pandal, realisation dawns that the next four days will elapse
in no time — and that they would have to once again wait for another whole year.

They would ideally like the calendar to bear only four days —
sashti, saptami, ashtami and navami — and make life an everlasting celebration,
but that would be like trying to hold on to the sand in your fist. The sand slips
out: day by day, month by month, year by year. And that’s how we get old.

Fortunately for Calcutta,
the end of Durga Puja does not mean the end of celebrations. Durga Puja is
followed by a host of other festivals, lasting throughout the year, before Durga
Puja stages a grand return once again.

But for a Calcuttan, a lot can change between one Durga Puja
and another. One may not be around to see the next Durga Puja in the neighbourhood
pandal for a variety of reasons: one could find a new job and move to another city,
one could get married and move to another city, or one could just die of
disease or accident during the intervening 300 or so days. To be present at the
neighbourhood pandal during Durga Puja is an assertion of being alive — and that
explains why the festival is such an emotional event.

I may not be a true-blue Calcuttan — I have been living in
Chennai for almost 16 years — but of late even I have been marking my attendance
on Planet Earth by visiting Calcutta every Durga Puja. That is why I feel so
emotional today — that the festivities must come to an end so soon. Can’t good
things last a little longer?

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Yesterday morning my publishers mailed me reviews of the Hindi translation of Chai, Chai appearing in three leading Hindi dailies —Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Jansatta— and that set me on the reminiscence mode.

I signed the contract for the book in November 2006, seven months after I got married — my wife sometimes jokes that while she brought me all the good luck, I brought her only bad luck, which is probably true — but it wasn't until July 2007 when I started travelling for it. I no longer remember what took me so long to get started, but I do remember receiving calls from my anxious publishers, who had already paid me an advance of Rs. 50,000.

So it was in July 2007 that I formally began my journey as a writer, when I stepped out of Itarsi station on a drizzly evening. I had no expectations to live up to, not many travel writers to look up to — my reading was limited to Paul Theroux and William Dalrymple. I had only a vague idea how a book was to be written — and the idea was, basically, to have fun and let things happen to you, rather than you chasing things: if things didn't happen to you, so be it.

I no longer remember when exactly I made the journeys to the other places described in the book — yes, Mughal Sarai was in November 2007 — but I do remember finishing the journeys shortly before 5 March 2008, when I joined the Times of India. The paper was soon going to launch its Chennai edition.

And then I sat on the project for months together, as I coped with pressures at the new workplace. It took a couple of more calls from the publishers to get me started with the writing, and once I got into the rhythm, there was no stopping. I would write from midnight till 4 a.m., wake up at 11 and go to the gym.I emailed the manuscript in March 2009 and, after spending two days in Pondicherry, went to Kanpur. I had no idea I was seeing my mother for the last time.

Back in Chennai, as I awaited the publication of the book, I began to pray. I lived in T. Nagar and my office was located precisely 2 km away, in Nandanam. Every day, I would pass the Balaji temple on Venkatnarayana Road, and I would tell Lord Venkateswara, "If Chai, Chai sells 10,000 copies, I will go to Tirupati and get tonsured."

But even before the book could come out — it hit the stands in September 2009 — my mother died. As per rituals, I had to get my head shaved. God had turned out to be unfair, unkind. I told Him, "I have done my bit, now it's your turn. Make sure the book sells 10,000 copies."
This time He heard me.

*

Today, looking back, Chai, Chai is a book I am at once possessive and embarrassed about.

Possessive, obviously because it is my first book, to write which I did things I can't imagine doing today: such as getting off at strange stations and, no matter what time of the day or night, setting out in search of a hotel. What if the town had no hotels? Well, I had no Plan B. Neither did I have the luxury of homework: almost nothing was available to read, online or otherwise, for me to get even remotely acquainted with those towns. Everything had to be experienced first hand.

Embarrassed, because I would do a far better job if I were to write the book today. I would spend more time in each place, search harder, dig deeper. It would be a thicker book, with less of whisky and more of chai — but that would also mean less kick.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

I often come across this quote, that life is like a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

When you read those words aloud you also, without realising it, make fun of people who do not travel. But to travel you often need two things: money and will. Many people don't have either, some neither.

But there are people who travel for a living — people who spend most of the week in airports and hotels, or in trains or buses — selling corporate solutions or FMCG products. I don't so much envy those living out of airports and hotels: they basically hop from one boardroom to another, and these days most boardrooms are usually located on the outskirts of a city. But I very much envy those who, to promote their brand of tea or toothpaste or chocolate, travel to the remotest of shops, occasionally hopping onto a passing truck or tractor if required in order to cover the areas assigned.

These fortunate people, since they have one eye fixed on the watch and the other on the target, largely remain blind to the places their work takes them to. They travel, but they wouldn't be called travellers.

Who, then, is a traveller?

A traveller, to me, is someone driven by curiosity: What lies there? The there could be a neighbouring town or a neighbouring country or a country 10,000 miles away — so long as you go there out of curiosity you are a traveller (if you go there only for the sights you are already familiar with, you are a tourist).

Which also means that you do not really need money to travel. I shall always cherish the trip I made to the town of Chandragiri, near Tirupati, in September 2011: I had driven down from Chennai with a friend and together, we would not have spent more than Rs. 2,000. We could have managed with even half the amount had we not chosen to stay in AC rooms.

There is another journey I shall never forget: I even remember the date — August 4, 2015 — because it happened to be birth anniversary of my idol Kishore Kumar. On that day, I took the morning flight from Chennai to Calcutta, and in the afternoon — after listening to a few Kishore Kumar songs on FM — took the flight to Bagdogra.

From Bagdogra airport, I was to drive south to Cooch Behar, to work on a story about the Bangladeshi enclaves that had merged with India just four days before. As the driver led me to the parking, I noticed a car with a red number plate, the registration number painted in the Devanagari script.

"The car you are looking at is from Nepal," the driver — a very nice man called Bindeshwar Yadav — satisfied my curiosity. "The registration says it belongs to the Bagmati zone of Nepal."

"How far is Nepal from here?" I asked him.

"The border is not even 30 km. Everything is close from here. Bhutan is hardly 70 km, Darjeeling 90 km."

My destination, Cooch Behar, was the farthest: 150 km. To come so close to these places — Nepal, Bhutan, Darjeeling — and yet not to be able to even peep into them, the thought saddened me. "I must come back someday," I silently willed, even though the possibility of another trip in the near future seemed remote, very remote.

Perhaps the hills heard me. Not even a year has passed since then, and I have already been to Nepal, Bhutan and Darjeeling.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Every January I fall in love with Chennai all over again. That’s when the sky is blue and the clouds are white, when the weather is at its pleasant best, when there is happiness in the air and when, for me, the sensations return — the sensations that had gripped me when I first set foot in the city and walked its streets.

Two days ago, January 15, I completed 15 years in Chennai, and because it is January, the memories of the initial days are once again playing in my mind in high definition. The reason I recall my arrival with such fondness is that I came to live in the city out of choice and not compulsion.

I was someone who could have idli and sambar for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and I never saw my lack of Tamil as an impediment. If anything, I found it very romantic that people you were trying to communicate with did not speak your language and you did not speak theirs. The ‘language problem’ was a delightful evidence that you had travelled — all the way — to live in a new land.

In short, I came to Chennai without expecting it to adjust to my ways, and instead came prepared to adapt myself to Chennai. And even though I had come from Delhi — north India — it helped that I was a Bengali, related by my surname to the land that had produced Tagore and Vivekananda. Even though the truth is that until 2001 — for that matter until 2006 — I had barely spent time in Bengal and had a ‘north Indian’ upbringing.

My very first home in the city was a lodge called J.K. Mansions located on Natesan Street in T. Nagar. The street ran parallel to the famous (or infamous?) Ranganathan Street. Every time I climbed up to or climbed down from my second-floor room, I would notice the hand-painted warning on each landing: “Female visitors not allowed” and “Consumption of liquor strictly prohibited.”

The first in-house rule was impossible to violate, but the second was violated with impunity because one evening, two days into my stay at the lodge, I found the manager escorting a carpenter into my room and getting the sole window secured with a wire mesh. “What to do, sir, people drink and throw empty bottles out of the window,” the manager explained, “neighbours are daily complaining.”

I wasn’t one of the culprits because I hadn’t discovered the wine shops of Chennai yet. On the evening of my Day One, I drank at the bar of Hotel Peninsula on G.N. Chetty Road, and on Day Two, I had drinks and dinner with my new colleagues at the rooftop restaurant of Hotel Ranjith in Nungambakkam. I was rich at the time: my father had given me Rs 40,000 — big money at the time — to start a new life in Chennai.

From Day Three onwards, however, I was having my evening drinks with select colleagues at a ‘bar-attached’ wine shop on Commander-in-Chief Road (Ethiraj Salai), which was right next to a now-defunct vegetarian restaurant called Shamiyana. We referred to the bar as Shamiyana.

I do not miss anything more in life than the sensations of those initial days in Chennai. Sensations are difficult to capture in words: the nearest you can get to doing that is by recalling memories.

Such as waking up to songs to Minnale wafting in from the window — who wouldn’t fall in love with the tune of Nenjei poopol?

Such as remembering, on waking up, that water would flow from bathroom tap only for half an hour — if you happened to sleep through those precious 30 minutes, you were screwed.

Such as sitting with bated breath in an autorickshaw as he took me flying from T. Nagar to my office on Club House Road (the journey lasted barely 10, at the most 12, minutes) — and feeling the rush of adrenalin as the autorickshaw sped down the hoarding-lined Gemini flyover.

Such as strolling out of office and stepping into Spencer Plaza, the only and the most happening mall of Chennai, mainly to visit Landmark, the bookstore, and Music World — my two favourite escapes.

Such as slowly emptying my quarter bottle (180 ml) of Old Monk rum in the company of colleagues-turned-friends at Shamiyana, and very rarely having an additional “ninety” or “cutting” (90 ml) — those days, don’t ask me why, alcohol and ambition went hand in hand; I could dream better while drinking.

Such as finding wine shops open even on Republic Day (in Delhi, almost every other day was dry day) and escaping death on the Republic Day of 2001 when, returning from an excursion to Mahabalipuram where we all drank vodka sitting on the seaside rocks, the colleague riding the bike lost control and I went sliding, face down, on the road — I survived only because ECR or OMR had not been constructed yet and there was no speeding vehicle coming from behind.

Such as sitting in the last row at those book launches that were followed by cocktails, totally in awe of those on the dais and eagerly waiting for the bar to open — but secretly hoping to be on the dais someday.

Such as having dinner from a roadside stall, either steaming idlis or hot parotta with ‘full-boiled’ egg (poached egg tossed upside down on the pan so that the yolk got fried as well) — the steam made you more hungry.

Such as going to sleep with the songs of Minnale still wafting in through the window, either from a neighbouring home or from the transistor of a watchman stationed close by.

Such as moving in, after spending precisely two weeks at J.K. Mansions, to the privacy of a flat in nearby Murugesan Street — a street I shared with Illayaraja for almost 14 years before shifting, in November 2014, to a street on the opposite side of North Usman Road.

The Chennai of January 2001 is not the same as the Chennai of January 2016. Everything has changed — everything — from the time I first set foot in the city.

T. Nagar, back then, was a residential area which also had commercial establishments; today it is a commercial area where some residential properties still exist.

Autorickshaw drivers no longer speed because there is simply no space on the roads to turn up the accelerator.

Wine shops and their bars, once run efficiently by private parties, are today run by the state government and the less said about their condition the better — anyway, the last time I stepped into a wine-shop bar was in March 2008.

I no longer go to book launches for the free drinks but to see, sometimes, my own books launched. What’s more satisfying is that one of the books is about Chennai.

My office on Club House Road has now transformed into Express Avenue. Spencer Plaza is a ghost mall. Landmark and Music World have shut down across the city.

There are far, far more places to eat and drink — and not just Dhaba Express or Harrisons.

The city limits no longer end with Thiruvanmiyur in the south and Mogappair in the west.

And as far as music is concerned — correct me if I am wrong — melody is nearly dead. Songs — even those created by the so-called Mozart of Madras, who gave several gems in the late 1990s — come and go. Nothing in the past 15 years to capture the popular imagination the way the songs of Minnale and, to some extent, Kaakha Kaakha did. But then, as far as melody is concerned, the city already sitting on a pot of gold: the music of the real Mozart of Madras, my neighbour of 14 years.

Three things, however, remain unchanged. Karunanidhi remains the leader of DMK. Jayalalitha remains the leader of AIADMK. And every morning, you find a freshly-drawn kolam outside every door.

If the city has changed, so have I. Naturally. Fifteen years is a lifetime. I came as a man who had just turned 30, today I am 45 — everything that has happened to me has happened to me in Chennai. So much so that I am no longer able to recall what I was doing with my life before I moved here.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

About
a couple of months ago I spent some time in Benares, where one day, while
walking to the Manikarnika Ghat, I chanced upon the Pashupatinath Temple, built
there about two centuries ago by the king of Nepal.

I
was immediately awestruck by the peace that prevailed over the temple. You
could stand on its terrace and gaze at the Ganga without realising you are in
Benares, a city overrun by pilgrims: just the perfect place for a one-to-one with
Pashupatinath, or Shiva — my favourite god.

But
since the temple is located right next to Manikarnika, India’s most famous
cremation ground, you cannot visit — or exit — it without noticing the piles of
wood or the smoke rising from the various pyres. Was the temple purposely built
near Manikarnika so that devotees could realise that even if Shiva granted
their prayers, they could not escape one reality, which was death?

I
wasn’t sure of that, but during my stay in Benares, I visited the Pashupatinath
Temple several times, and during what turned out to be my final visit, a young
caretaker gifted me with a poster of the original Pashupatinath Temple, located
in Kathmandu. I wanted to be in Kathmandu that very moment — just to complete
the journey. But I did not see myself travelling to Nepal in the near future,
and so I accepted the poster and told myself, “Okay, someday.” I had no idea,
back then, that ‘someday’ would arrive so soon.

I
have been in Kathmandu for the past two days now, and since today happened to
be my birthday, I decided to begin the day with a visit to the Pashupatinath
Temple. I prayed for myself and for people who matter to me, and then moved to
the rear side of the temple — to a terrace overlooking the Bagmati River.

As
I looked down the terrace, I saw a Manikarnika-like ghat below me —there were bodies
either being cremated or being prepared for cremation — only that the Bagmati
turned out to be so unbelievably narrow and shallow that you could hardly call
it a river. Oh, the familiar smell of burning flesh!

On
the steps across the river stood mourners — friends and distant family members of
the deceased — who weren’t directly involved in the rituals of cremation. There
was something very dignified and official — and not impersonal, as it happens
in Manikarnika — about these cremations.

Suddenly
it struck me that I was the birthday boy, who should be celebrating birth and
not observing death, and I moved away from the terrace — but not without the reinforced
realisation that every single birth has to meet death someday.

Perhaps
that is why the two Pashupatinath temples — in Benares and in Kathmandu — adjoin
cremation ghats, so that devotees know that no matter how much they please Shiva,
they cannot escape death.

I
wouldn’t have thought on these lines had I been 10 years younger: I would have got
drunk — or had mindless sex — to celebrate my birthday. But once you turn 45,
as I did today, you realise that death is a part of life. It is a different
matter that you still feel your life has only just begun — miles to go before
you sleep.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

About
five months ago, I bought a pair for Rs 1,700 from Express Avenue in Chennai,
and the humble brown chappals turned out to be the most loyal set of footwear
I've ever owned.

They
clung to my feet as I walked along the border with Pakistan in Punjab, walked
the border with Bangladesh in West Bengal, Tripura, Meghalaya and Assam (and
sometimes even stepped into that country), strolled though the fields of
Plassey where Robert Clive's forces once met the army of the Nawab of
Bengal, walked on the beaches of Kerala and Karnataka, roamed the town of
Udupi, returned to my hometown Kanpur after a long gap of three and a half
years, walked on the banks of Brahmaputra and the ghats of Banaras.
Wearing them, I stepped into planes, trains, taxis, boats and cycle-rickshaws.

As
far as I remember, they have been properly polished only twice in these five
months: once, when I had deposited them at the footwear-counter at the Golden
Temple, and again when I stood with a boot-polish wallah at the door of a
moving train (I was travelling from Malda Town to Murshidabad) and he offered
to shine them.

The
other night, as I was leaving Kanpur, my father handed me some money, saying I
must buy new clothes for Durga Puja. I thought of buying a pair of sandals with
that money, something I could wear on formal occasions as well, but instantly decided against it: the pair of Alberto Torresi had given wings to my feet — I never travelled so incessantly as I had ever since I bought the slippers — and I wanted to use the pair till it lasted. Call me superstitious if you like.

Travel: the word defines me today, even though the truth is that most of the time I am absolutely stationary, reclining on bed in the 'Vishnu pose', head resting on the palm (left palm, in my case). But while Lord Vishnu can be seen reclining on a slithery bed of serpents, enjoying the attention and receiving the services of many divine characters, I usually laze on a cotton mattress, alone, my thought process aided by the supply of Gold Flake Kings. On waking up I often wonder where I am, and once I assume the 'Vishnu pose' I reflect on my location.The other morning when I woke up, I found that I was in a train. My travels were coming to an end, for now. My feet and lower back hurt. In Calcutta, I walked into a Thai spa. After the happy ending, I suddenly remembered the tagline of this blog — 'Account of a journey. Destination: salvation.' And then it struck me that I had coined those lines exactly 10 years ago.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Today I did
some of the things I had been wanting to do in Benares. I had two freshly-made,
hot rasagullas (only Rs 10 each); I
had not one but three Banarasi paans (the idea was to have only one but I
quickly returned for two more); and, above all, covered nearly all its 84 ghats
on foot — travelling a distance of about 7 km — from Assi Ghat on the southern
extreme to Prahlad Ghat on the northern.

I made the
return journey by boat, choosing to be its sole passenger, for Rs 500. The boat
was steered by two 13-year-olds, though they looked much younger, and as we
glided on the Ganga in the most glorious moments of dusk, I saw something I had
been wanting to see: a body floating in the river. At first I thought it was a buffalo,
but as it bobbed closer to the boat, I could see the outline of a human head.
To be doubly sure I asked the boys, “What’s that floating?”

One of them
replied: “Laash hai, laash!” — It’s a body.

A rewarding
day on the whole. While I was walking on the ghats, the most exhilarating
moment was the discovery of the Pashupatinath Temple, built by the Nepalese
some 200 years ago, on Lalita Ghat: totally empty, a perfect place to meditate,
and it also gives you a commanding view of the river. Then I lingered for a
while at Manikarnika Ghat, and then walked on before stopping at Panchganga
Ghat, where I climbed up the steep steps to visit the shrine of Trailanga
Swami, considered an incarnation of Lord Shiva.

At the
shrine, an elderly man, who looked south Indian, was meditating in front of the
life-size figure of Trailanga Swami, also depicted in the meditative pose. As a
caretaker showed me around and told me about the life of Trailanga Swami, the
man got up and came closer to listen.

“Will you
please translate what he is saying,” the south Indian man requested me.

I told him
whatever the caretaker had told me, and then asked him, “Where are you from?”

“Chennai,” he
replied.

“Where do you
live in Chennai?”

“Thiruvanmiyur.
Why, are you familiar with Chennai?”

“Yes, sir. I
work with The Hindu.”

“Wait a
minute, are you —?” He mentioned my name.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, we are
already friends on Facebook!”

The long
walk, in spite of the company of the river and of Shiva, had been quite a
lonely one. Suddenly, I didn’t feel lonely anymore.

*

The two young
boatmen dropped me at Shivala Ghat from where I climbed the steps and walked
back to my hotel. My feet hurt but I was happy about the day being well spent,
and that I had no deadline dangling over my head to keep me up all night. I
wanted to have two drinks and go to sleep, so that I could wake up early and
catch the sunrise.

But as soon
as I flung myself on the bed and looked at my phone for notifications — as one
instinctively does these days — I learned that Ravindra Jain, the music
director, had passed away. The smugness evaporated and sadness crept in. I sent
the room boy to get me half-bottle of whisky. Ravindra Jain, after all, defined
my childhood: R.D. Burman came into my life much later.

Geeta Gaata Chal released when I was five or six, and after
the watching the film in the theatre, with my parents, I would often try to imitate
Sachin as shown in the title song — a happy-go-lucky youngster carrying nothing
but a flute and a small bundle of clothes and singing away to glory. I wouldn’t
have pretended to be Sachin had I not been attracted to the song, and if the song
was appealing to even a six-year-old back then, imagine what Ravindra Jain’s
music must have done to the grown-ups.

Needless to
say, most of his songs were a hit those days, especially in the part of the
country where I grew up. The singer might have been Yesudas, a Malayali, or Jaspal
Singh, a Punjabi, but the rendition always made you smell the soil of the Gangetic
plains, the heart of IndiaI

Since I am a
Kishore Kumar fan, and since Kishore Kumar and Ravindra Jain shared a healthy
rapport as long as both were alive, I would like to present five songs they
created together — songs that went to become legends as well as songs that I personally
cherish:

Sunday, June 07, 2015

Shortly before I decided to move to Chennai — the decision
was taken in the year 2000 — I read a report in Outlook about how the conservative city was changing and becoming
more hip. To support its claim, the report had cited the opening of a new pub
called Hell Freezes Over, or HFO, where the young and the happening were
descending every night to party until the wee hours.

The report had contributed, even if in a small way, to my
decision to move to Chennai from Delhi.
My salary in Chennai was going to be Rs 18,000 per month; whereas in Delhi, even with a salary
of Rs 15,000 or even less, I was going to the discotheque every now and then. I
imagined myself sitting in HFO almost every night, buying drinks not only for
myself but also my new friends and shaking a leg with them.

Fantasy and reality, however, rarely see eye to eye. Once in
Chennai, my evenings were spent in filthy bars that are attached to wine shops.
To know about those experiences, click here. As for HFO, I visited it precisely
twice during the years it remained open in the city.

After having three drinks in a filthy bar and dinner (usually
parotta and fried eggs, from a roadside stall), I would come back home, read
and write (longhand, because there was computer or internet at home back then),
and because there was no internet, I would also watch TV before going to sleep.
I had two favourite channels at that hour, SS Music and Fashion TV.

SS Music had a midnight programme called Hot, Hotter, Hottest (an expression
often used to describe Chennai’s weather), whose intention was to arouse the
male audience. It must have been quite a task for its producers to scan the
archives, on a daily basis, and select only those songs that took more pride in
the cleavage than the composition.

Once the programme got over, I would switch over to Fashion
TV and subject myself to the unending sight of skinny models walking down the
ramp in locations so remote, culturally and geographically, from Chennai. I
would keep watching until I had seen enough topless models — those days you saw
plenty of them. In between fashion shows, the channel would also show footages
of parties held to celebrate the opening of the F Bar (nightclub promoted by Fashion
TV) in some Western city or the other. Back then I believed that if one got invited
to such a party, one had arrived in life.

Last Thursday, when I walked into office, I found a black,
diamond-shaped card on my desk waiting to be opened. It invited me to the
opening of the F Bar in Chennai. On the one hand the invite didn’t mean a thing,
because a new nightclub opens every other day in Chennai and such things no
longer interest me; but one of the other hand the invitation, seen in the light
of my belief during my younger days, meant a lot. And so I showed up at F Bar
on the night of its opening, and also had the picture below taken — just to remind
myself of the old times when, in the absence of internet at home, I would watch
Fashion TV. Chennai seems to have come a long way, and so have I.

Friday, June 05, 2015

One afternoon, when I was in the eighth or ninth standard,
two men (one of them bearded) walked into our classroom, carrying cartons. To
each student they handed two yellow packets — our introduction to Maggi noodles,
or, for that matter, any noodles. Since my younger brother also studied in the
same school, we came home with four packets.

Looking back, it was such a smart move, to target the
children. Some years later, when I had left school but my brother was still
there, a new brand of sanitary napkins — I forget which brand — took the same
route, but the company was stingy unlike Maggi: I remember my brother telling
me about the girls in his class being summoned to the library and handed one
napkin (and not a packet) each, and the girls bringing them back to the
classroom by hiding them between the pages of notebooks.

Back to the Maggi story: so that afternoon we had four
packets of noodles at home. Since they had come for free, they had to be tried
out. My mother opened one packet and put the contents in boiling water, though
I am not sure if she meticulously followed the instructions printed on the
packet, because what materialised was a plateful of white earthworms with the
masala sprinkled on them. Inedible: I spat out the noodles. Another packet was
opened, but the outcome was hardly any better. I don’t remember what happened
to the remaining two packets. But what I do remember is that both, my brother
and I, came to love Maggi in a matter of months. Once again, I do not remember
how the transformation came about, and that too so soon, but I do remember that
Maggi noodles, back then, came in three flavours — masala, chicken and sweet-and-sour —
and each time we cooked the chicken noodles, our cat would get supremely
excited and demand its share.

Even though I came to love Maggi, I wouldn’t say my life
depended on it. Maggi, to me, was always a great option, but not the best
option: nothing looks more attractive to me than a plate of steaming rice
topped with steaming arhar daal. Add
a few slices of onions and a spoonful of pickle to the plate — that’s the best
meal one can ever ask for.

But then there are times when you really crave for Maggi,
even when you don’t feel too lazy to cook. In fact, making Maggi, the healthy way,
can be more tedious than preparing just rice and daal. My Maggi always contains green peas and finely-chopped
capsicum, carrot, beans and, occasionally, cauliflower. Just when the noodles
are ready, I add to the pan one boiled egg (sometimes two boiled eggs) and finely-chopped
tomatoes and onion. To me that is a wholesome meal.

There are also nights when I am wifeless and when I am
writing, and when I do not want the thought ‘So what I am going to have for
dinner’ to interfere with my writing — that’s when Maggi comes in handy. And now the
authorities say that Maggi isn’t safe and are taking it off the shelves. But
then, what is safe — certainly not the
air we breathe and the water we drink. First
give us clean air and water, then we shall talk about the safety of the food
we consume.

This evening, as I shopped for groceries at the
supermarket, my eyes fell on the shelf carrying Maggi noodles and was surprised
that the packets were still on display for sale. I instantly picked up a
four-pack noodle packet and put it into the basket. This was at 6.30 pm. By
8.30 I learned, from tweets by friends, that Maggi has been
banned in Tamil Nadu. I felt lucky: anything that is banned becomes more alluring.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

I wish I had the habit of keeping a diary or
journal, looking back at each day before going to bed or recording thoughts and
impressions as and when they came — of course, leaving out parts that no one
other than me must know.

No harm retaining the parts the world shouldn’t
know, as long as no one reads your diary or you know how to keep it safe — or if
you have a family that is tolerant of your behaviour. Brutally honest diaries
often make for good, even great, literature; only that they are usually
published — quite naturally — posthumously. One such great work published: The Journals of John Cheever. Must-read.

Coming back to keeping a journal, I think it is
very important for a writer or an aspiring writer to get into the habit for two
reasons. One, the daily introspection keeps alive your ability to synthesise
thoughts into words. Two, the matter you produce each night adds up to being a
goldmine: you can create several masterpieces out of it, fiction or
non-fiction, without having to invent a scene or a situation, because it is all
recorded in the diary — raw.

The idea is to always look and listen, and
instantly note down anything you find intriguing or interesting. For that you always
need to carry a notebook and a pen — something I always ignore unless I am out
for a story.

Recently, while dining at Koshy’s in Bangalore — and I had not gone to Bangalore for a story — I overheard a
conversation between two old-timers which I thought was worth writing about. I
was carrying a pen, but no notebook. So I quickly jotted down the conversation,
before it vanished into thin air, on a paper napkin. Back home, the wife
discovered the napkin in my suitcase and wondered, even though she is past
caring about such things, if it was a love note. I explained to her that the
scribbling was a conversation I had overheard between two old-timers at Koshy’s:
one of them urging the other to keep coming back for dinner so that Koshy’s — the
old Bangalore institution
— remains alive.

Had I carried a notebook, I would have had no
explanations to offer and got far more details to record. Memory, after all, is
slippery and often fails you when you need her the most, but the written word
is like a piece of rock — the more you write down your thoughts and impressions,
the more rock-solid your story is.

That is why V.S. Naipaul is such a rockstar,
especially when it comes to writing about places. The Granta magazine, in an issue devoted to India some years ago, had
an entire chapter devoted to Naipaul: it reproduced the first four pages from
the journal that Naipaul kept when he was visiting India — this was his second
visit to the country of his ancestors — to write India: An Wounded
Civilisation. Each handwritten page is faced by a transcribed version of
the same so that the reader doesn’t have to struggle to decipher his
handwriting, even though Naipaul’s handwriting is pretty legible. What the handwritten
pages prove is that there was very little difference between Naipaul’s notes
and the prose he eventually produced — and how important it is to take copious
notes.

I now wonder if my books would have been richer
if I too had meticulously taken notes while roaming the towns and cities I have
written about. Not that I did not carry a pen and notebook, but the compulsion to
take/make notes always melted away when I found myself in situations worth
writing about. I wanted to live the situations rather than distance myself from
them by taking out my notebook. But there is one way you can not only live your
experiences but also write about them in a distanced manner: by writing a diary/journal
at the end of the day.

Here is what Vinod Mehta (it’s so painful to
prefix ‘late’ to his name) has to say about Naipaul’s style of functioning, in
his autobiography Lucknow Boy: “Vidia
(V.S. Naipaul) never carried a notepad, much less a tape recorder. One hot
afternoon in Lucknow,
after walking through the narrow, filthy lanes of Chowk… we came to our hotel
ravenous and thirsty. Vidia skipped lunch and locked himself in his room to
make ‘notes’. His memory was awesome. He could reproduce long conversations
without getting a word wrong.”

After a long day, a lesser mortal like me would
rather unwind with a drink or go shopping. It is too much of an effort to lock
yourself up in a room and write down all that you encountered in a day. Had I
done that, I would have taken half the time to finish each of my books and they
would have probably read better. Memories are richer when written than
recalled.

From now on I am going to follow Naipaul: make
notes at the end of each day while working on a book. I have already purchased six
new notebooks, all world-class, and four new fountain pens, all sturdy and
India-made, so that I don’t fall short of stationery while visiting the city I
am going to write about next. Just that I shouldn’t feel too lazy to makes
notes. It is laziness, more than anything else, that stands between a genius and could-have-been-genius.

Monday, May 25, 2015

A Beautiful Mind, the movie, ended beautifully — you left the
theatre with a tear or two.

But in real life, that beautiful mind
has met with such a tragic end that you read and reread the news of mathematician
John Nash’s death in disbelief.

Disbelief not because he died —
he was already 86 and not very far from a natural end — but the manner in which
he died. You expected someone like him to die peacefully in his sleep, having
lived a full life, and not getting ejected out of a speeding taxi that hits the
railing and to lay lifeless on the road.

Each year, a handful of
bespectacled scientists are chosen for the Nobel Prize: they remain anonymous
until they are named for the honour and, outside their fraternity, continue to
remain anonymous even after they have got the Nobel. It is usually the Nobel-winning
writers who get all the attention and, as far as I know, the only ones who get
to make an acceptance speech.

In other words, very few people had
heard of John Nash until 2001, when A
Beautiful Mind, a movie based on his life, released, with Russell Crowe
playing Nash. By then Nash had already won the Nobel for economics, in 1994, for
his work in game theory.

The movie’s objective was,
obviously, not to educate the public about game theory but to tell the story of
the beautiful mind behind it — the story of a man who fights paranoid
schizophrenia and goes on to make remarkable achievements in the world of
mathematics.

And to imagine the man who won a
Nobel and whose life story won four Oscars, lying on the road, lifeless, at the
age of 86. And he had just landed from Oslo,
after collecting the $800,000 Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in
the field of mathematics. What a way to die.

The only consolation is that died
with his wife, Alicia, 82. She too was flung out of the cab when it hit the
railing. The accident spared them a lonely walk to sunset, because one of them
would have certainly died before the other had they both not died together.
Very few loving couples, who have spent five or six decades together and who
would feel totally lost in case of them dies, earn that kind of an end. That
way, the beautiful mind had a beautiful ending.

Only the manner in which they
died was anything but beautiful. And that’s why Nash’s death, just as Nash’s
life, has become hot news.

After I read about the terrible
accident — on my Facebook timeline, where else — I immediately googled ‘John
Nash’. This is what Wikipedia told me: “John Forbes Nash, Jr. (June 13, 1928 –
May 23, 2015) was an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential
geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the
factors that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life.”

Insight into the factors that govern chance and events inside complex
systems in daily life? I guess no one, except God, if there is one, is
entitled to such an insight. Nash certainly did not have that insight when he
and his wife took the cab in New Jersey to go
home, having just arrived from Oslo.
His death, even though his life was all about complicated mathematical
equations, leaves us with a simple lesson: wear the seatbelt. Nash and his wife
weren’t wearing seatbelts.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

She walked out of the restroom gingerly, as if not to
distract fellow diners with her footsteps, and took her seat noiselessly — as
if she wanted her existence to be a whisper. "Please be very honest with
me," she said, "am I boring you?"

"Boring?" I replied, "I am sitting with one
of the prettiest woman I have ever known. Another beer?"

"Yes, please. But am I boring you with my
stories?"

"I am a good listener."

"You don't have to be polite. Anyway, now I will tell
you how I met Pascal."

"Pascal, who?"

"That French guy I was telling you about the other
night?"

"Ah, your French boyfriend."

"I don't think I can call him a boyfriend. I met him
only once, four years ago, but I can never forget him — never. I preserve his
number, you know, even though I have changed phones. But I have never had the
courage to call him all these years."

"Why?"

"What if he sounds different? Worse, what if he sounds
indifferent? There have been times when I almost dialled his number, but I held
myself back."

"Interesting."

"Interesting or silly?"

"Very interesting. So how did you guys meet?"

"Oh yes, so coming back to the story. I was in Paris at the time — I had
gone there on work. One afternoon, I was at an antique shop, just looking
around, when my eyes fell on a guy who was looking around as well. He was tall,
well-built, the first thing I noticed about him was the tattoo on his upper arm
— it said Om Namah Shivaya, in the
Hindi script. Our eyes met more than once; and even though I was curious about
him because of the tattoo, I was careful not to keep looking at him."

"You could have said Hello and asked him where he got
the tattoo from, no?"

"How could I make conversation with a total stranger?
What if he wasn't interested in someone invading his privacy? You know how
foreigners are."

"And then?"

"Well, he walked upto me and said, 'Hello, I am Pascal,
you from India?'"

"Wow. And then?"

"And then he asked for my phone number. But I refused.
How could I give my number to a total stranger? I quietly walked out of the
shop. Later that evening, I went to a bookshop for a poetry reading. Some
French poet had just published a book of poems, which had also been translated
into English. The French part was read by a very handsome Arab — perhaps an
Algerian. And the English part was read by guess who?"

"Who?"

"Pascal!" A tear escaped her left eye.
"I sat at the bookshop transfixed. It was as if Pascal was reading those
poems for me. How beautifully he read! I kept looking at him. I wanted to tell
him, with my eyes, why he wanted to have my phone number when he could have me!
You have no idea how magical that evening was."

"And then?"

"And then we went to a cafe where Hemingway is supposed
to have got drunk often. You have heard of Hemingway?"

"Of course, I have."

"Like Hemingway, I too got drunk, really drunk, but I
remember everything — everything. Pascal drank as much as I did, perhaps even more,
but he was sober. That's the thing with Western men, they usually hold their
drink and rarely get obnoxious even when drunk — unlike Indian men. Indian men
put me off when they drink."

"I am Indian!"

"But you are a dear friend."

"I was kidding. I know I act silly when I am drunk,
though I don't remember putting anyone off. Maybe I have — who knows — one
doesn't remember things when drunk."

"But I remember that evening so well."

"So what happened next?"

"Pascal asked me to spend the night with him. He was
staying a walking distance from the cafe, maybe a kilometre or two. My hotel
was far off."

"So you went with him?"

"It took me a while to decide. At first I wondered,
being an Indian women, should I spend the night with a stranger — that too a
white man? What will people say? How shall I explain my absence from home to
them? Then suddenly I realised that this was Paris, where I did not know a soul and where
I did not have a home. It did not matter to anyone, including me, whether I
spent the night in the hotel or with Pascal — and I had already fallen in love
with him."

"So you went with him?"

“Of course. And you know what, one of my sandals broke as
soon we came out of the cafe. I walked with him barefoot, carrying both the
sandals in my hand. He offered to carry me home — in his arms — but that would
have been too much, so I said no. But how romantic, the whole gesture! Once we
got into his flat, he made coffee for both us — and then we made love."

"Was it good?"

"I am not going to give you details," she smiled
shyly, taking a sip of the draught beer, "but let me tell you one thing: I
am a small-made woman, even by Indian standards. I am petite. Pascal, on the
other hand, is huge. He has a huge chest. And you know what I found on his
chest?"

"What?"

"A tattoo showing the portrait of Lord Shiva himself!
That turned me on even more."

"And then?"

"Well, when I woke up the next morning, I found the
sheets stained with blood. I cried at the sight of the blood, not because I
felt scared, but because I was elated."

"Elated?"

"Because I had been practising abstinence for many
years. Four years, maybe five years?"

"But why?"

"You must put that question to my husband. By the way,
he is also a Bengali — like you."